I came across an interesting article the other day suggesting that Europeans are better than Americans at living life. Since I’ve never been to Europe, I decided that I should at least know what I’m missing, and I started to read. The first thing I learned is that most Europeans have better healthcare than most Americans, with places like Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and Italy ranking in the top ten, while America was number 46, just ahead of Serbia and Brazil. And it would also appear that Europeans are doing better than us in areas like public transportation, life expectancy, soccer (we have never won the World Cup), vacation time (Europeans get as much as 35 paid days off a year), fuel efficiency, auto racing (NASCAR simply goes around in circles while Grand Prix races are held on the lovely streets of places like Monaco), beautiful castles (we at least have Disneyland), and sexy accents. Oh, and of course while most of us Americans are still dealing with teaspoons, tablespoons, pints, quarts, gallons, inches, feet, yards, miles, bushels, nautical miles and furlongs, Europeans simply use easy-to-compute metric measurements.
Anyway, knowing of course that no one should believe everything they read in the newspaper, I decided to go to a much more reliable source, a longtime pen pal who has spent most of her life living right in the center of Europe (the Czech Republic) and our email conversation went something like this:
“Well, Daryl, if you want me to tell you about some of the differences between Europeans and Americans, I will attempt to do so, but you have to understand that there are always many exceptions to some of the generalizations I will be making. But I think that there really are quite a few differences. For instance, when people are successful in America, most people seem to praise them, and everyone is happy for them. But if a person is successful in Europe, there is often much jealously, and people do not wish them well.
Unlike Europeans, Americans seem to be very religious. Of course, we have lots of believers here, too, but they don’t seem to find their way into our politics like they do in America. We try to separate religion and politics as much as possible here. Americans’ great pride of their country is also unfamiliar here, too.
Americans often seem to praise their children over every little thing they do and not put very many limits on them. For instance, I have a good American friend and her daughter is now wearing a pair of shoes that do not fit her feet because they were the only ones in the store that the child liked and thought were pretty. In my country, a child wears the right size shoe, no matter how much she likes another ill-fitting pair.
I hear this is changing, but I think American young people try to grow up and become independent quicker than they do over here. In Europe, the number of young people who do not want to leave home (and their mother) is high since they find it much more convenient and cheaper than living alone.
Americans seem to be much more conservative than Europeans, especially when it comes to nudity and sexual attitudes. Americans are also always smiling at each other and saying nice things. We call them the `smiling Americans’ over here.
I think other differences might also include that the emancipation that American women have is almost unimaginable in much of Europe; that Americans seem to use charge cards a lot and buy things they don’t really need; and that Americans seem to travel much less to other countries than we do because they are always working.
Anyway, as the world becomes a much smaller place, hopefully our differences will become much smaller, too.”
A few days after receiving the very helpful email from my Czech pen pal, I mentioned it to a friend of mine who has been to Europe a number of times and he reminded me that there are lots of different kinds of Europeans.
“For instance,” he said, “Italians are very different from Germans, other than their World War II alliance of course, and that turned out so bad that I don’t think those two countries will ever see eye-to-eye on anything again. And for good or bad, the French are of course unlike just about everyone else in Europe. But if you ask me, the difference between Americans and Europeans really comes down to two simple things.”
“And what might they be?” I asked with interest.
“Cheese and chocolate,” he said with a smile. “In Italy alone they have hundreds, if not thousands, of different kinds of wonderful cheeses, while we actually eat that god-awful stuff that is wrapped in little plastic squares that we slap on hamburgers to turn them into cheeseburgers. And when it comes to chocolate, Europe has the finest gourmet chocolates in the whole world. Do you know what our best- selling chocolate is, Daryl?”
“No, what?”
“M&Ms!”